I am new to the forum and new to Python. I am neuroscientist and I have lots of experience in with Matlab by little with Python. I am very interested in using Python to do some computer vision work for the lab, but I am having a really hard time getting up and running with Python and SimplyCV. I purchased the O'Reilly Practical Computer Vision with SimpleCV but I cannot seem to be able to get SimpleCV to run. Unfortunately, the book is no help. I have looked at the documentation for the SimpleCV download and install but I am still having problems. Here are some specifics.

I am on a new Mac running OS 10.8.3If I look at my applications, I have both Python 2.7 and 3.3 installed

If I go to the Terminal on my Mac and type "python", i get Python 2.7.3 (v2.7.3:70274d53c1dd, Apr 9 2012, 20:52:43) [GCC 4.2.1 (Apple Inc. build 5666) (dot 3)] on darwinType "help", "copyright", "credits" or "license" for more information.

if I type "from SimpleCV import Shell"

I get, "ImportError: No module named SimpleCV"

I downloaded SimpleCV and it went straight into my downloads folder, but I have no idea how to install or run it.

Also, we can try to help you with this, but ultimately it might be something wrong with the distribution and you'll have to contact the creators directly. OS X definitely sucks as far as a development environment for non-pure Python third party modules.

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It seems like it was downloading it OK but failed to install it. It does not prompt me for an administrative password however. Is there a way to force it to allow the install by telling it that I am in fact the administrator of the computer?

Yeah, you can put "sudo " at the beginning of the line to git it admin permissions. Also, I asked about the last line in the whole process, but if there are any previous lines that you got permission denied for, then they need to be run first with admin permissions.

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Well thanks micseydel, that worked! Progress was made and I'll go from here. One more quick question. If I want to figure out what I just did, as in what the sudo command and the terminal commands are doing, where would I go to look. I understand that this is not really Python yet. Is this a Unix shell or something. Where would send me to research more about it?

Yeah no worries, glad to help! Google and Wikipedia are excellent, you might learn random stuff if you read xkcd and Google what you don't understand (and I think there's a forum for it too). Besides that, you can type "man <command>" in a terminal and get a very thorough manual page on the command. Try "man ls" and "man sudo" to see what I mean.

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Looks like I got really close but not quite. It seems I'm having problems getting pygame to install nicely on this mac. Accodording to the SimpleCV installation guide I should be able run this line from the terminal to install pygame